Film Review #51: THE LOST CITY ******** (2006) *** Director: Andy Garcia *** Cast: Andy Garcia, Inés Sastre, Nestor Carbonell, Bill Murray *** Who can blame Andy Garcia if he got the bends? When it all finally came together, his window for location shooting of The Lost City in the Dominican Republic was just 35 days and his budget under $10 million. Garcia’s passionate elegy to mid-century Havana’s cultural, political and musical upheaval, The Lost City, was an idea he’d nursed since 1985 – the same year he says he started making his living as an actor and could afford epic movie dreams. For the last 16 years he collaborated with expatriate Cuban writer G. Cabrera Infante on the script. Also star and director, Garcia produced the film score’s nearly 40 songs and nightclub production numbers, wrote five of them and then performed some of the music on-screen. *** Despite anticipatory feature profiles of Garcia last spring, reviews of the film were luke-warm. Complaints were sundry. These ranged from the film’s perhaps self-indulgent length (143 minutes), to Garcia’s own acting, to whether Bill Murray’s tart role belonged there at all, to the film’s eye-wideningly irreverent portrait of Che Guevara. The soundtrack alone drew raves and was scheduled for CD release well before the film itself. *** Now The Lost City’s DVD release is announced for August 8th. And you know what? The Lost City has been moseying along, holding its own for all its flaws. In pretty much its last week of commercial release after a three-month run, The Lost City is on-screen in 24 cities across the US. *** It will be worth catching on DVD for reasons beyond its obvious visual loveliness and soundtrack. These would include Infante and Garcia’s gauntlet-provoking take on Che Guevara, the film’s use of women, and Garcia’s highly physical acting and directing, all of which support The Lost City as a film as much about memory as history. *** The Lost City covers the years 1958-61, during which several factions waged resistance against military dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had run Cuba since 1933 and reportedly murdered some 20,000 people. Fidel Castro’s guerillas entered Havana in January 1959 after 25 months of fighting. Andy Garcia was six years old when he and his family left for Miami in 1961, apparently getting very little out past Castro’s airport guards. The film portrays this time via the fictional Fellove family saga, which centers on three brothers and their differing paths. *** Eldest brother Fico (Garcia) presides over the nightclub La Tropico, echoing both Casablanca’s Rick and last year’s The White Countess. Oddly, memory tempts me to recall The Lost City starting with an elaborate dance number at Fico’s club (with the fastest hip shimmy this side of David Lachapelle’s dance doc Rize). Actually the film’s opening titles first overlay a Batista security officer’s abrupt execution, performed in the name of the shadowy resistance fighter “Pelligra.” This turns out to be middle brother Luis (Nestor Carbonell). Luis is later assassinated in a breath-stopping scene on a windy roof-top amid bright white sheets on a clothes-line. *** Luis is pivotal to the story’s arc and resonance, a lost brother of such haunting stature that Castro and company always fall short. Fico engages a vivid but short-lived romance with Luis’ widow Aurore (Inés Sastre), eventually leaving her for New York City at his parents’ insistence as Castro’s reforms accelerate. Aurore joins the regime. The youngest Fellove, gullible, surly Ricardo (Enrique Murciano of Without a Trace), simply rides into the hills one day, correctly trusting Fidel’s men to find him. Fico tangles with US gangster Myer Lansky (Dustin Hoffman), loses his nightclub, and enjoys an enduring friendship with an unnamed oddball writer played by Bill Murray. *** Historical events often anchor The Lost City’s abundant plot. Luis’ participation in a doomed effort to storm Batista’s palace parallels that of March 1958. Castro’s land reforms did nationalize the large plantations; here, Ricardo blithely informs his uncle of the confiscation of land that is clearly the source of the Fellove’s wealth, causing the uncle’s collapse. Fidel and a large contingent did visit the United Nations in 1960, making plausible Aurore’s midnight visit to Fico in a New York City diner. *** But The Lost City’s striking treatment of revered lefty icon Ernesto Che Guevara stands out. At least Garcia and Infante – a disillusioned former cultural attaché for Fidel – are even-handed; their Batista is a chilling sadist. We meet beautiful Che (Jsu Garcia) casually shooting wounded Batista foot soldiers where they lay in the dirt as he passes. The film presents Che’s role at La Cabana prison where he supervised executions of Batista’s police. One is a boyhood friend of Fico’s. Che lets Fico to beg for his friend’s life, then enjoys telling him the man’s already dead. *** This has been a banner year for Che’s memory, given Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries, the retrospective exhibit of Che images at Manhattan’s International Center for Photography, and on-going gallery screenings of Leandro Katz’s remarkable 1997 short video about photographer Freddy Alborta, whose pictures documented Che’s body on display following his murder in Bolivia. Reconsideration of Che to this degree recalls the rocky fate of Jonathan Demme’s 2003 documentary The Agronomist, about Jean Dominique, assassinated founder of Radio Haiti. Soured on Aristide, the journalist confronts him on-camera and on-air about corruption within his party, Lavalas. This unflattering scene has gone largely unappreciated among what might have been a natural audience. *** That Garcia personifies Cuba as a woman – to be wooed, seduced, fought over, cherished, lost – makes his movie’s Che more disturbing. Che aggressively, intimately kisses Aurora at the garden party when Fico wants her to leave. And Fico, an avid photographer, is so mad to get Aurore’s close-up image on film that he follows her waist-deep into the surf at the beach – a microcosm of Garcia’s own abiding need to capture this receding era on celluloid, and of Fico’s “home movies” when he’s alone in snowy New York City. An especially magnificent sequence cross-cuts Luis’s dance-like assault on Batista’s palace – leaps up and down staircases – with Fico filming dancing women at his club. For brief flashes, Fico appears to be present at Batista’s palace, filming his brother’s head-long dash. As for Aurore, she finally prefers Che’s honorific title for her, Widow of the Revolution, to feeling decorative though prized – “useless.” (So might a country’s people.) *** Well, who can really blame her? Except for those who entertain on-stage, The Lost City’s women have little to do except cluster down the hall while their men discuss and decide. One female character at the Fellove household – perhaps a baby sister, perhaps Ricardo’s wife – never speaks at all. The most thick-headed aspects of Fidel’s regime appear in the person of a soldier (the fine actor Elizabeth Pena is an incongruous role) who tells Fico which musical instruments his club’s band may use. With revolutionary logic, she reviles the saxophone, based on what its inventors, the Belgians, did in the Congo. *** We should remember that this is a film emotionally based on memory and what a six-year-old lost. The Lost City relies heavily on the physical expression of emotion in, for many, a non-familiar culture. Greatly admired stage performers at Fico’s club include the old and the pot-bellied as well as the young and trim. The Fellove men are extravagantly affectionate with each other, hugging, cradling heads, stroking, embracing, kissing often. Ricardo shambles and lurches, mirroring the ill fit of the regime’s demands. Particularly in Fico, moments of great physical restraint and stillness offset great, fluid physicality. These extremes, derided by some as Garcia’s “wooden” acting, match other stretches of the film’s dilated perception, part of recollecting what’s lost – over-long, over-ripe, hazy scenes of Fico and Aurore strolling on a beach in fashionable hats, for example. Though not the final word on Cuba, who can blame him? ********** [1,285 words] *** This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com & published there 7/28/2006.

Film Review #50: THE BLOOD OF MY BROTHER *************** Although he has now made three documentary films, Brooklyn-based Andrew Berends is first and foremost a still photographer. This may account for both the major problems & the most memorable, haunting qualities in his film, The Blood of My Brother, about how one Iraqi family carries on after its eldest son is killed by a US military patrol in Baghdad. This striking 84-minute film is one of two that Berends shot during eight months in Iraq two years ago – the other, When Adnan Comes Home, follows the almost-lethal incarceration of a 16-year-old boy arrested for stealing a few yards of electrical cable. Blood of My Brother premiered at Amsterdam’s International Documentary Festival last December, made the prestige doc festival rounds in Tehran, Prague & Athens, & had its US debut at Manhattan’s Tribeca Film Festival in April. On June 30th, it opened in limited theatrical release. *** It did not do well. As a movie you see in a regular theater, The Blood of My Brother has come & gone. This is not for an atmosphere uncongenial to films about how ordinary Iraqis have fared during this increasingly unpopular war. Lincoln Center’s Human Rights Film Festival in early June particularly highlighted such films – not just Michael Winterbottom’s related Road to Guantanàmo, but the Spanish documentary Winter in Baghdad & James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments, winner of three Sundance awards. Coming up on August 4th is Laura Poitras’ anticipated My Country, My Country, whose footage & sound she shot entirely alone while following a Sunni physician during his inspections of Abu Ghraib prison, treatment of patients & run for legislative office. *** My point is that Blood of My Brother has been born into excellent movie-making company at a time when documentary audiences seek a view of life on the other side of the battle-lines, though if any war destroys the remnants of thinking in such neatly demarcated images, it is surely this one. *** The Blood of My Brother expresses that very chaos in its fragmented on-screen narrative. Here is what Berends’ film is about. The Iraqi portrait photographer Ra’ad al-Azawi, an eldest son, is about to open his own photo shop. The night before the big day, a US patrol kills him while he is guarding the Shiite mosque in the Kadhimya section of Baghdad. Ra’ad is dubbed a martyr, his funeral attended by thousands. Younger brother Ibrahim, 19, now responsible for the family, struggles with whether to maintain the shop – for which he has neither talent nor business aptitude – or join the forces of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi militia. We see truly stunning footage of both insurgent gatherings & urban warfare – don’t forget, over 120 journalists have died covering this war – a demonstration for peace in Najaf, interviews with exceedingly young US soldiers, Ra’ad’s mother’s first visit to his grave, & Ibrahim’s eventual loss of the shop & descent to menial day labor. We do not see the story in anywhere near this order or clarity, but I’ll come back to that. *** There is a deep sadness at every turn in this film, from the opening moments in which Ibrahim awkwardly tries to persuade his bereft mother that it’s time to leave the cemetery. What emerges, & endures long after the film ends, is Andrew Berends’ felt kinship with Ra’ad al-Azawi as brother photographers. Ra’ad’s delicately colored portraits of children grace the screen from time to time, though initially it’s not clear they are his work. And, with what comes to seem like the filmmaker’s patience with Ibrahim, this movie finally becomes the intended generous act of a stand-in spiritual brother toward the slouchy, inarticulate, actually not very attractive young man. At some point, what flashes as vividly across the screen as the incessant deadly bursts of war is the sudden recognition that recording & telling another’s story is itself an act of kinship, a kind of looking-after the younger brother that Ra’ad himself might understand. *** These things emerge because Andrew Berends is a powerfully skillful and talented photographer whose subject is actually another photographer. The primary flaw in the film is that it’s nearly impossible to follow on its own. Because I had a press kit when I saw it, I had the benefit of Andrew Berends’ statement about his intentions as well as background information. I suspect this film has not done well in theaters because most movie-goers expect a film labeled “documentary” to have a minimally orderly narrative – even though many will recognize figures like Moqtada al-Sadr from newscasts, & even allowing for the film’s aesthetic expressing the chaotic experience it records. *** There’s another setting in which a film like this does fit. And that is where you will be able to see it. As gallery exhibits, films, videos & photos customarily have just such explanatory artists’ statements attached to them as Berends has written for this one. We expect these statements; they free visual art from demands for narrative order & provide context. Once I knew that Blood of My Brother is part of such a project, my discomfort relaxed. Inexplicably, this information was not part of the publicity during the film’s brief solo life as a feature movie. *** Unembedded is the name of the collective gallery project of Andrew Berends, filmmaker James Longley (whose doc, Iraq in Fragments, is also making a stab as a free-standing movie), & four other photographers. All have worked solo in Iraq since the US invasion. These include Rita Leistner, who covered a women’s unit in a Kurdish militia & more recently, women who seek refuge in Iraqi psychiatric wards to avoid honor killings; Kael Alford – she covered Baghdad during the shock & awe bombing; Thorne Anderson, & an Iraqi, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, whose training as an architect shows in his pictures. The exhibit presents 60 still photos plus the Berends & Longley films. Now on tour, it’s opening tonight, actually, at Orange County Community College in Middletown. It later goes to Phoenix, Detroit, & in October, to Yale University. You can buy the book, with all 150 photos, on-line. There’s a website with a generous sample of extraordinary photos. I’d like to see Embedded come to Syracuse – in my mind’s eye, it’s already right at home at LightWorks or the Lowe Gallery ot the Community Folk Art Gallery. Join me? * (1,050) *** This review was broadcast on Women's Voices Radio, WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM on 7/20/2006.

FILM REVIEW #49: HEADING SOUTH *** (2005) *** Director: Laurent Cantet *** Cast: Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, Menothy Cesar, Louise Portal *** ******* For a couple reasons, you might be inspired to watch over again Ingmar Bergman’s scalding 1966 meditation on the Vietnam War, Persona. The writer Robert Emmet Long was on NPR just last week, talking about his new book of interviews with Liv Ullmann, Bergman’s long-time screen muse. Deceptively slender at just 82 minutes, Persona was Ullmann’s first film for the great Swedish director. There’s also a surprising echo on-screen right now. Discussing her work in Heading South by phone recently, New York City-based actor Karen Young said that Persona inspired French director Laurent Cantet’s approach to his film’s four monologues. That’s not the only similarity in these two movies about reversal. *** Heading South is set in steamy, late-1970’s Haiti during the last days of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s bloody regime. This seems far from the chilly Swedish coast, the late-night ramblings of Bibi Andersson’s Nurse Alma and the silent retreat of Ullmann’s troubled actress character, Elisabeth Vogler. Cantet’s tale assembles a group of well-off, older North American white women who repair to an insular beach resort and the favors of young, poor Haitian men. Karen Young’s Brenda is a Georgia divorcee who’s returned, seeking Legba (Methony Cesar). She tussles over him with Charlotte Rampling’s older Ellen, a French lit professor from Wellesley College. Affable, chunky Montrealer Sue (Louise Portal of The Barbarian Invasions) completes their trio. *** Direct depiction of Duvalier’s regime is spare but devastating. In Persona, Bergman needed only two short worldly references – a TV clip of a Buddhist monk’s self-immolation and an older photo of Nazis marching a five-year-old Jewish boy in a cap with his hands up – to make his point about private violence mirroring public events. Canter’s film opens in Port-au-Prince Airport as the resort’s gravely fastidious manager Albert (Lys Ambroise), there to pick up Brenda, fends off a woman trying to sell her daughter to get her out of Haiti. Later, Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes pursue Legba in a panicky, desperate chase through market and alley – we don’t know exactly why, though perhaps the terror matters more than the reason. Then, the morning after he rebuffs Ellen’s offers of protection, the thugs dump his body on the resort’s beach. Ellen is shattered. Brenda – whom Cantet calls, expressly without judgment, the most optimistic character in all his films – soon plans to move on to other islands. *** Heading South is based on Dany Laferrière’s La Chair du Maître (The Master’s Flesh), which Cantet read on the outbound flight from his first week-long trip to Haiti in 2001. Fresh from the Sundance Festival’s warm embrace of his film Time Out, Cantet went to visit his parents, retirees training Haitian teachers for an NGO project. The appalling poverty and class gaps he saw rapidly produced extreme discomfort. Laferrière’s book provided a ready framework for cinematic portrayal of the tourist’s position as spectator. Cantet cites Laferrière’s own remarks about physical desire and sex, as both political metaphor and the only means for contact in a society where relations between the classes are so “terrifying.” Indeed Heading South reminds us that this may seem more obvious when women are vulnerable, by opening with just such a gender reversal: the desperate mother and daughter in the airport. *** Laferrière’s short story collection already contained monologues. When Heading South screened in February at the Toronto Film Festival, that city’s Sun observed that the monologues – by each of the three women plus the older Haitian, Albert – create documentary-like interviews within a fiction film. But watching Persona illuminates Cantet’s remarks that Brenda especially struggles to put her sexual experience into language. He says, “It’s more unsettling to hear her talk about it than it is to watch the images of it.” This is much like Nurse Alma’s recitation of beach sex with boy strangers. Moreover, Brenda finds almost commensurate pleasure in finding the words. *** Albert’s monologue – he so hates whites that he won’t touch them without gloves on – sets the stage for Ellen’s private exchange with him after Legba’s death. She confides to this very proper man, whose rank means he must listen, that Legba could make her climax as soon as he touched her – an intimate detail somehow shocking exactly because Albert is her own age. Lest we think this deep sense of impropriety simmers only among old fogeys, Legba earlier stops an innuendo-laden dance between Brenda and a boy named Eddy. Eddy hotly protests, “You’re not my father!” But do the math – Cantet scrupulously provides ages and timelines – Legba was also about twelve when Ellen first hit town. *** Unfortunately most comment reduces Heading South to a story of “sexual tourism” or simply – luminous though she may be! – “Charlotte Rampling’s latest movie.” Both shortchange a film of considerably more layers. Karen Young says she never heard the phrase “sexual tourism” until the movie was three-quarter’s done, but allows it’s “an easy thing to sell it on.” *** If you too recall Young as FBI Agent Robyn Sanseverino in HBO’s The Sopranos, who first insinuated herself into ill-fated Adriana’s life while rifling a clothing rack in a pricey shop, her memorably arresting quality translates well to the big screen. She’s steadily worked in film and TV since 1981. Young found the part itself and collaboration with Cantet so satisfying that “it was hard to come back from” – despite a delayed shoot (Aristide’s chaotic 2004 fall from power), left-over gun-fighting, weather so unstable the schedule changed 27 times and a daily 45-minute drive by bad road to the resort’s set over the Dominican border. *** Brenda’s urgent searches for Legba – when she first arrives and later when he’s missing – frame the film’s central narrative. Her arrival startles all three women; somehow they’ve uncritically imagined their Haitian beach boys were not seeing other tourists when they went home. Among its other eventual reversals, Heading South is really more about Brenda. Her transformation contains a future, while Ellen transitions here to twilight. Young’s nuanced, often primarily physical performance is prodigious and should mark a turning point in appreciation and projects. *** Further, Heading South at first seems a departure from Cantet’s previous feature films, in which he overtly focuses on “the religion of work” – a naïve son’s come-uppance against a French factory’s shift to the 35-hour week in Human Resources (1999) and an unraveling executive’s pretense to his family that he’s working after being fired in Time Out (2001). Cantet notes about this film, “You do not have poor victims on the one hand and the bastards who manipulate them on the other. Everyone gets something out of it.” That Heading South is about these young men as “workers,” whose wages include food and attention, seeps into one’s consciousness like some hot blush. *** All Cantet’s films have US theatrical premieres that follow a testing of the waters at some Lincoln Center festival – this time, the RendezVous With French Cinema series in March. His features are all available from netflicks, as is the made-for-TV Les Sanguinaires (1998), one of seven pieces anticipating the Millennium that toured the globe in 1999. Even The Troubles We’ve Seen – young Cantet was, perhaps formatively, first assistant director of Marcel Ophuls’ doc on the history of combat journalism – screened in New York in 1994. His new project, a fiction film with non-professional actors, is based on interviews with Hurricane Katrina survivors. Probably no walk on the beach either. *** Heading South opened June 7 in Manhattan. It opens July 21 in Los Angeles and in limited release thereafter. Hear Nancy Keefe Rhodes’ interview with actor Karen Young broadcast on Women’s Voices Radio, WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM on Thursday, July 27th at 8:00 p.m. DST via web-streaming on www.waer.org. This review was written for www.stylusmagazine.com.

Film Review #48: WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? *** Director: Chris Paine *** Cast: Martin Sheen, Chelsea Sexton, Stan Ovshinsky *** There’s a scene in the 1991 satire Naked Gun 2 ½ in which a sinister Robert Goulet tells a roomful of shadowy big oil and coal executives that they are right to be frightened. He reels off a list of innovations – from light bulbs to electric cars – that could save vast amounts of money and energy, destroying their profits and making their products obsolete. Except, he assures them, no one will ever know. Naked Gun 2 ½ depicts a scheme to kidnap a scientist who advocates solar energy. First-time feature director Chris Paine uses this scene in his new documentary about a real-life plot unfolding at about the same time that climaxes with the kidnap and destruction of almost an entire fleet of such electric cars, the General Motors Saturn EV-1. *** Who Killed the Electric Car? is chocked full of details that provoke an “I never knew that!” response – where has the media been during all this? The movie also has three things going for it: a savvy understanding of America’s mixed relationship with the car, a crew of filmmakers who are both activists themselves and techno-literate enough to grasp some fairly intricate science and numbers, and the good fortune to premiere in the light cast by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The recent Los Angeles Film Festival even ran a Saturday double bill of both movies in downtown LA’s California Plaza as part of a Green Day with related parties and events. *** Between 1996 and 2003, the Saturn EV-1 was available to lease in California and Arizona. There were actually nine electric vehicles on the road during this period, from Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Ford and Chrysler. Among them only the Toyota RAV4 EV was for sale – one of the film’s producers bought the very last one sold. Paine concentrates on the Saturn EV-1 as the prototype and most important because of GM’s leadership in this whole affair. Actor Martin Sheen, adding The West Wing’s gravitas, narrates. *** In 1987, after GM won a solar-powered car race in Australia, CEO Roger Smith directed their Saturn division to come up with a commercial electric car. Developed completely in California – Alan Cocconi built its first battery in his garage – the project remained a secret, outside Detroit’s loop. The two-seater EV-1 was unveiled at the 1990 Los Angeles Auto Show. Shortly after, aware of EV-1 and eager to combat the worst levels of air pollution in the US, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) passed the Zero Emissions Mandate. This required 2% of all new vehicles sold in that state to be emission free by 1998 and 10% – estimated between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 – by 2003. *** But by 1996 – nine months before the Saturn EV-1 was actually offered to the public – GM had lobbied CARB to soften their mandate and base the quota on consumer demand instead of percentage sold. Paine’s movie portrays how GM, in concert with the oil industry and other car-makers, went about actively undermining and then denying that consumer demand. This took effort, since the EV-1 was immediately popular, generating long waiting lists. Paine features a host of engineering experts, colorful inventors, fresh-faced advocates and celebrities touting the EV-1 – on late-night TV, actor Tom Hanks tells David Letterman, “That sucker goes!”, then adds, “And I’m saving America!” *** The EV-1 was quite fast, silent, clean, fun to drive, cost only about $5 to re-charge and required little maintenance and parts replacement. Its brake system alone would cost the lucrative brake repair industry millions. When Stan Ovshinsky invented a battery that increased its range, GM bought the rights and told him to keep quiet about it – “I expected applause,” the white-haired, twinkly-eyed holder of 200 US patents ruefully tells Paine. Eventually Chevron/Texaco bought the battery and put it on the shelf. After all, GM had also bought up competing trolley car companies and shut them down, thereby creating urban demand for cars. *** There’s plenty of drama in Who Killed the Electric Car? Both drivers and sales teams were so fond of the EV-1 that they organized when GM re-called its 800-car lease fleet. They protested. They held a mock funeral. They offered GM $1.9 million to buy back one 78-car lot. Chris Paine hired a helicopter and filmed EV-1’s crushed at GM’s remote desert proving grounds. When GM sued CARB in 2002 to completely dismantle its emissions mandate, the Bush White House joined up, offering legal support, tax credits for SUV’s and the lure of hydrogen fuel cells. In one of the clearest sections, Paine demolishes the promise of hydrogen fuel cells – which are derived from fossil fuels and won’t be commercially viable for at least twenty years, enough time for the oil industry to get at the rest of those trillion barrels of oil still in the earth’s crust. *** Chris Paine and company understand America’s romance with cars but also our more everyday, enduring affection. Like all romances, this one has sometimes blinded us. There’s a wonderful montage of advertising and film clips that convey the illusion of mystery, wealth, glamour and open road that cars promised mid-century. Then the dramatic fog drifting around a vintage Caddy’s giant chromed tail fins morphs into the brown smog hanging over a grid-locked freeway – that “inconvenient truth.” But don’t forget this film appears during the summer of the wildly popular animated movie Cars, surely a descendant of The Little Engine That Could and all that conjures up. The EV-1 and its class-mates are zippy, compact, friendly. Easy to give personalities. Activist Chelsea Sexton, part of Saturn’s original and most successful 13-person sales team for EV-1 in California until laid off in 2001 and now executive director of Plug-in America, calls them “my babies.” *** Luckily (mostly) for audiences, Chris Paine and his crew came to this project already knowing the field. Most have driven electric vehicles. Paine and some of his producers are among the “digerati” who worked in computers and then turned to introduce digital innovation into filmmaking. They understand the science, have a coherent analysis of events and can articulate both. The text boxes and subtitles on-screen are hard to read and go by too quickly, but only occasionally does Paine let his own geek enthusiasm override good judgment about how much is too much. *** Really this is a cross-over film. In format a well-done but fairly conventional documentary, it might have enjoyed a modest theatrical run or screened on PBS. Instead, Who Killed the Electric Car? rides in the slipstream of Al Gore’s movie – and that, if you think about it, is really more a rock concert film than a documentary. That’s okay, because Gore’s film overcomes many people’s reluctance to listen to difficult, overwhelming and confusing material. Films like Paine’s will benefit from curious, fired-up audiences who now more readily connect some dots. *** Perhaps coincidentally, the activist organization MoveOn.org held some 300 rallies at gas stations around the US to demand that Congress stop accepting Big Oil’s money on the same day Who Killed the Electric Car? opened. In Washington, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History quietly removed its rare surviving EV-1 from display earlier this month. And violent rain squalls and flooding continue in much of the northeast. . . *** Who Killed the Electric Car? opened in New York and Los Angeles on June 28th & goes into wide release on July 21st. *** [1,234] This review was written for www.stylusmagazine.com.

THE ROAD TO GUANTÁNAMO *** Directors: Michael Winterbottom & Mat Whitecross *** Cast: Riz Ahmed as Shafiq Rasul, Arfan Usman as Asif Iqbal, Farhad Harun as Rhuhel Ahmed, Waqar Siddiqui as Monir. *** You can’t say we weren’t warned. *** This British film’s theatrical release in a dozen US cities on June 23rd has been a little like the arrival of a fleet of tall ships whose masts we have watched bear down on our shores from over the horizon. Just as film alone, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ docudrama about post 9/11 detention of terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba arrives here already acclaimed (Silver Bear Award for Best Director at this year’s Berlin Film Festival), and to an unusual degree – at least in the New York City area – already seen. The Road to Guantánamo screened twice in early May at Tribeca Film Festival, and again last week at Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center, not to mention the five Manhattan press screenings in between. As political performance art, this movie - centering on four young, real-life British Muslims of Pakistani background swept up in the US invasion of Afghanistan - also resembles another recent British import. The film alternates enactments of what happened with interview snips from the surviving three and archival news footage. Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo’s 2004 play, Guantánamo – Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, presents enactments of four other young men imprisoned in Guantánamo, cobbled from their own statements and letters, and political figures like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Photos of real-life counterparts are projected on the set’s back wall. The play opened off-Broadway to coincide with the August 2004 GOP presidential convention, and then had healthy runs in Washington, San Francisco and, as recently as March, Chicago. The play’s title – Honor Bound to Defend Freedom – references a sign outside Guantánamo’s Camp X-Ray compound, which in light of growing charges can’t help but echo the “Arbeit Macht Frei” signs outside earlier camps. *** Spilling into its own larger context, the film’s opening now seems part of a powerful convergence of events. Growing calls to close Guantánamo from bodies both here and abroad include the U.N. Committee on Torture in Geneva, in May and again on June 23rd following the June 10th suicides of three Guantánamo detainees. The principals in Winterbottom’s film were quickly quoted by US media covering those suicides as sources about harsh psychological conditions there. *** Michael Winterbottom has said that his attraction to their story was of ordinary guys swept up in overwhelming events. Shafiq, Asif and Rhuhel – dubbed the Tipton Three for their hometown in the industrial Midlands region of England – are well-connected ordinary guys. Winterbottom first contacted them about a film project through their lawyer, Gareth Peirce. As a young British journalist, she was transformed by a stint in the 1960’s covering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., earned a law degree and has built a career on high-profile human rights and political defense work. She’s had other cases on-screen – for example, see Jim Sheridan’s 1993’s In the Name of the Father. In 2002, Shafiq and Asif were among plaintiffs in cases that resulted in the Supreme Court’s 2004 ruling that Guantánamo detainees have access to US courts to challenge their detentions. And last month, a US District Court cleared the way for their $10 million suit against the Bush Administration for violating their right under US law to practice their faith while in custody. *** Even so, I’m afraid such background doesn’t adequately prepare you for watching this movie. The Road to Guantánamo is important, remarkable and more disturbing than we usually want our movies. Here is what the film recounts. *** On September 10, 2001, Asif Iqbal’s mother returns to Tipton from a visit to Pakistan and tells him that she has chosen a young woman there for his wife. Nine days later, he leaves for Pakistan; soon after, friends Shafiq, Rhuhel and Monir follow. They rendezvous in Karachi, joined by Shafiq’s Pakistani cousin Zahid. During sight-seeing in the capital, Zahid takes them to a mosque. An imam urges them to join humanitarian groups heading for neighboring Afghanistan, which faces impending US invasion. They go. There, they encounter war-time chaos, illness, carpet bombing, bad directions and Northern Alliance troops who arrest them in November during the Taliban’s fall near Konduz, after first having traveled to Kandahar and Kabul – quite a lot of ground. Monir disappears in one evacuation. Zahid winds up in prison in Pakistan. *** So far, the young Brits – one wears a GAP hoodie over his indigenous clothes – have suffered primitive dangerous barbarism. Now they will survive high-tech dangerous barbarism. Shafiq, Asif and Rhuhel eventually wind up at Guantánamo. The film’s remainder depicts their transport, processing and graphically brutal imprisonment in wire cages and solitary, sessions with US and British interrogators, and eventual release back to England in March 2004. None was ever formally charged. *** An epilog follows the three as Asif returns to Pakistan for his long-delayed wedding. This section is unexpectedly satisfying because we see the actual young men in real time, in their own lives. Only then is the stress and confusion of seeing two of each character on-screen apparent. There is such figure-ground vibration in combination with witnessing human extremity that reviewing the film is hard. Some reviewers note in detail how upsetting, even physically grueling, watching it is – then turn around to criticize its cinematic competence. One reports experiencing “helplessness and dread” – the combination producing trauma – then crossly says the movie’s “far from great.” Another dismisses US detention practices as not much different from your standard-issue fraternity hazing, then oddly garbles his basic plot recap as if he wasn’t able to watch the screen. *** One feels unmoored in this film, but I lay that to its power and not to sloppy filmmaking. Adept throughout his career at crossing generic boundaries, Michael Winterbottom has made choices. He is explicit that he wasn’t making a documentary about the Tipton Three, but rather “their version of what happened to them.” Co-director Mat Whitecross spent a month interviewing the three, gathering 650 pages of transcript, and Winterbottom says, “We weren’t trying to independently check or cross-reference what they were saying.” *** So there are unanswered questions and dramatic gaps. Why weren’t at least their parents worried about such a trip on the eve of war? Maybe that Pakistani cousin was trying to recruit them to Al-Qaeda? Where were their families during all this? How come that bride waited for Asif? On the other hand, with one exception, the filmmakers also restrained themselves from easily-made, sarcastic side-swipes at George Bush and company – what might pass for telling the rest of the story in some documentaries. The story holds its own as emotional truth. *** Part of that emotional truth arises from the use of largely non-professional actors and on-location filming in Pakistan, Afghanistan and, because of its own well-developed film industry, Iran. Winterbottom’s long-time casting director, Wendy Brazington, sought students from the English Midlands. Only Rizwan Ahmed, who plays Shafiq, had acted before. They haven’t the dramatic focus or physical economy of trained actors. They supply an ungainliness and lack of pretense that conveys how ordinary late teens might grapple with such circumstances – even as many adults in the audience find composure elusive. So the characters are open. Open to a young soldier’s kindness in not startling a sleeping detainee while killing a poisonous spider in Cuba. Open as well to taking in the full colossal arrogance of an American female interrogator who suggests one of the three “work for us now.” *** Winterbottom doesn’t think films have a huge impact. I think this one might. I’m just probably not going to see it again for a while. *** (1,253) An abridged version of this review was published at www.stylusmagazine.com on 6/26/06.

Film Review #46: Adam and Steve – Broadcast 6/15/2006 on Women's Voices Radio WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM *** Originally the religious right linked the names “Adam and Steve” as part of their campaign against gay marriage. You might have heard them chanting the slogan, “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” In the time-honored tradition of oppressed groups taking back the language, Craig Chester has now made a movie with two gay protagonists named – well, Adam and Steve. Besides writing and directing the film, Craig Chester plays Adam. Malcolm Gets, formerly of TV’s Caroline in the City, plays Steve. Comedienne Parker Posey plays Adam’s ditzy best buddy Rhonda & Saturday Night Live’s Chris Kattan plays Steve’s ditzy straight roommate Michael. *** We should start with Craig Chester himself, a well-respected & hard-working actor on the indie scene since the 80’s. He’s been involved with Sundance projects, he played one of the leads in 1992’s Swoon, about the Loeb-Leopold child murder in the 1920’s – worth catching if you have netflicks, by the way. He’s also appeared in films like Mary Harron’s Who Shot Andy Warhol? You’ll find Chester quoted extensively in the new spring issue of Movie Maker Magazine in film critic David Sterritt's thoughtful article on the influence of Brokeback Mountain and other gay cinema. Craig Chester has now branched out from acting to writing & directing; he’s also got another film called Save Me! in production for 2007 release. *** So Adam and Steve is Craig Chester’s first feature film. It’s slated for DVD release in both the US & England on August 21st, although this week this relatively new film is playing at only three regular movie theaters in the country. I suspect that Adam and Steve will mostly do well on exactly the kind of platform it’s getting here in Syracuse – festivals & fund-raisers. I wish this were a cross-over film but alas, that is not likely. *** Adam and Steve begins in 1987 New York City, 17 years before the main story’s present-day romantic comedy plays out. In their younger incarnations, Adam & Rhonda were black-clad Goths, & Steve was a glitter dancer in a glam chorus line. This establishing pick-up between our two heroes ends disastrously, a point we’ll come back to. Fast forward to the present: Adam, now in recovery from coke, is an ornithologist with a dog named Burt. Steve’s a fastidious psychiatrist. Through a Rube Goldberg contraption of a plot twist, they hook up again & a really rather endearing romance ensues, complete with meeting both sets of quirky parents, struggles over commitment & a marriage proposal, Rhonda’s efforts at stand-up comedy in empty clubs, & AA meetings. *** Always lurking, however, are the neighborhood gay basher & the long-ago encounter, which neither at first recalls. The latter is not an insurmountable crisis: it all does work out & toward the end sort of morphs into a musical too. There’s a nod to Brokeback in a snazzy, impressive Western-themed dance number. There's also a moment when Steve, to prove his love, breaks into a song about how somewhere he must have done something good in his miserable childhood. You know the one – I think it’s from The Sound of Music. Actually a character in one of my favorite TV shows, Boston Legal, burst into this very same song during his wedding this spring, only Shirley Schmidt – that is, Candace Bergen – was on hand to whip her head around & squint in disbelief. *** There is a lot of that sort of thing in Adam and Steve – abrupt, vertigo-inducing swerves of tone, Saturday Night Live-style skits beamed down into the middle of serious scenes as though from the Enterprise itself. I don’t mind the changes in tone all that much, though some are ill-advised & clumsy. Some extremely serious filmmakers are working hard these days to inject a more life-like range of mood & tone in their films. That's legitimate, though Adam and Steve lacks a Candace Bergen to stand in for us all in marking the whiplash at its most extreme moments, a function not really served by Steve's own horror at his past. *** The love story is well-played & affecting, emerging periodically from a careening wackiness. But I wonder about that. How much is uproarious farce on-screen & how much is our own on-going blend of relief & hope that the worst might be over? No, the failure at cross-over appeal, I’m afraid, occurs right at the film’s beginning with its 1987 prologue. Most reviewers have handled this scene with the word “scatological,” making it an inside joke. So if you know anything about doing cocaine & cutting it with baby laxative, you’ll get it. Let’s be honest: this scene is offensive – down to the splash of Steve’s feces on Adam’s already heavily mascara-smudged face. *** A key here is that it’s offensive to Craig Chester too – the excesses, the foolishness & the posturing, the damage that people did themselves. Who among us does not look 17 years back without some mortification? Chester’s sense of camp & his eye for excess are both unerring, & although he says this film is supposed to be “dessert” after the “heavier meal” of Brokeback, I think his aims are more substantial. It’s worth watching to see how his grasp matches his reach in future efforts. But this is probably not the best next film for your brother-in-law who just loved La Cage aux Folies. *** Adam and Steve screens Sat., June 17th at the Eastwood Palace, 2384 James St., at 7:00 p.m. Sponsored by the Stonewall Committee as a fund-raiser for their LGBT booth at the New York State Fair.

Film Review #45: DOWN IN THE VALLEY (2006) *** Writer & director: David Jacobson *** Cast: Edward Norton, Evan Rachel Wood, David Morse, Rory Culkin *** Talking to NPR about his role as out-of-place modern cowboy Harlan Carruthers in Down in the Valley, the actor Edward Norton commented that “modern life entombs us and drives us to seek ways to start over.” *** Starting over is central to the myth of the Western, of course, and never far below the surface of any American story of reinvention – so powerful that it makes films like Malick’s The New World almost pre-quels. Norton, also a producer for this film, reportedly spent many hours with writer-director David Jacobson watching classic Westerns. So his Harlan undergoes a kind of deranged hyper-reinvention that is about taking the Western in the wrong way. *** Claiming he’s just arrived in L.A. from South Dakota, the 30-ish Harlan takes up with 15-year-old Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood). When she invites him to the beach, he quits his job to go. Soon he’ll lose his lodging and the remnants of his shaky, patched-together self over her too. Tobe has Harlan’s pants off as soon as she gets inside his seedy kitchenette. If Harlan is a time-bomb, Tobe is a handful. In one scene she throws a tantrum that requires her sheriff’s officer father, Wade (David Morse), to restrain her, reminiscent of the harrowing climactic scene in Wood’s 2003 breakout film Thirteen. But Harlan’s stories crumble, as Wade is sure they will, and Tobe pulls back from him on her own. Not soon enough: Harlan shoots her in an impulse terrifying for its very brevity and takes off with her little brother Lonnie into the hills. Wade pursues them on horseback to a bloody showdown. *** Well, unsurprisingly Harlan isn’t from South Dakota. He’s from just down the coast – Dan something, an identity so insubstantial that we barely catch his name or the town he’s really from. In this light, that he’s never been to the beach until Tobe takes him suggests the dreary confines of a life he’s tried to leave. *** Despite the easy reference to Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1976) – both Harlan and Travis Bickle practice their fast-draw with Colt .45’s in front of a mirror – the setting here is distinctly West coast, and the tone cinematically older that 1970’s disaffection. Harlan reminds me more of Lee Marvin’s portrayals of young punks in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Budd Boetticher’s recently resurrected Seven Men From Now (1956). Despite his capacity for belligerence, Harlan’s painstaking practice is about finding someplace to fit in. Harlan would like to be part of Tobe’s family, with a father who plays guitar and a little brother he could teach stuff to. When Tobe refuses to run off with him, Harlan quickly takes Lonnie instead, and it’s almost a more fitting match. *** Down in the Valley also presents another version of modern life’s “entombment” than the closed walls, dark hallways and dead-end alleys of New York City – a softer, deceptively open version. The first sound we hear is the whiz of traffic on the San Fernando Valley freeways. Jacobson puts Harlan, Tobe and Lonnie near these freeways right away, where they can see those round, brown California hills and that large California sky through the mesh fences and the netting of overhead wires. This is urban sprawl so rapid and haphazard that it’s left scraps of land like the ridges above the freeway and the tiny pocket beyond where old Charley (Bruce Dern) keeps a few horses. The freeways provide the illusion that you’re going somewhere, that you could get away – a constant provocation to the restless. Of course our cowpoke’s job is pumping gas, and of course Harlan and Tobe first glimpse one another through a car window – which for many Americans doubles as a sort of portable, street-level movie screen. *** Down in the Valley boasts always competent, sometimes excellent acting. As Tobe (“short for October”), Evan Rachel Wood is convincing both losing her head and coming back to her senses. She has three films opening in the next year, including the screen version of Augustin Burrough’s Running With Scissors, and this movie is reason to anticipate any future work she does. After years mired in TV type-casting and mostly forgettable films, David Morse deserves good character roles like this more often. Rory Culkin gives a finely directed, restrained performance as the watchful, susceptible little brother, Lonnie. Jacobson has fashioned particularly queasy possibilities for this youngest character. After target practice with Harlan, Lonnie could shoot somebody now. And in Harlan’s coaching in overcoming fear of the dark, we glimpse how the bond between John Muhammad and a younger John Lee Malvo might produce the DC snipers. *** Edward Norton’s Harlan is remarkable. He’s famously made his bread and butter since Primal Fear out of playing roles as much about performance itself as other aspects of character motivation. From their collaboration Jacobson has tailored his plot so that the film’s action follows and enlarges this by-now resonant side to Norton’s own work and so makes it the film’s heart. Just as Harlan is not what he claims, Down in the Valley’s plot works as a series of junctures at which we don’t know if what we see is what we get. We often share this uncertainty with those on-screen. When old Charley accuses Harlan of stealing the white horse, we wonder along with Tobe whether Charley’s playing a joke or off his medication. When Harlan shoots Tobe and later himself, the camera abruptly cuts away each time. When Harlan and Lonnie stumble onto a Western film set at dawn, Harlan’s eyes wide with wonder – for a disorienting moment, maybe this is, who knows, a dream sequence? *** Mostly Jacobson succeeds with – and survives, perhaps – these swerves into uncertainty; this film is far more engaging emotionally than its obvious recent mate, Wim Wenders’ disappointing Don’t Come Knocking. There is a trace of unwieldiness here, as when a singer’s voice isn’t quite under control. And Down in the Valley presents conventions from the Western movie in pretty distilled form. Both Harlan and Wade resort to guns. Harlan’s a man on a white horse. When he hides it in the garage of a tract house, the horse tries to kick its way out, and so on. Yes, clunky. But part of what I like about that hokey movie set that the characters pass through is the dimension it adds to the housing tract construction site – Americans are still building sets upon which to enact modern life, still practicing so we look right. *** [1,078] June 11, 2006: Written for www.stylusmagazine.com

Film Review #44: KINKY BOOTS (2005) *** Director: Julian Jarrold *** Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Joel Edgerton, Sarah-Jane Potts *** Since its U.S. opening last month, Kinky Boots has fallen into place as the latest “naughty” British comedy based on sexual innuendo among the strait-laced. It follows The Full Monty, Mrs. Henderson Presents and Calendar Girls, even sharing a scriptwriter and producers with the latter. Setting this film in a shoe factory – with warmly leather-hued, circling close-ups of the assembly line comprising the opening title sequence – probably encouraged complaints that Kinky Boots is just another knock-off. Kinky Boots is only a song or two shy of a full-fledged musical, a genre that depends upon not straying too far from type or complicating what happens between songs. *** It’s not hard to detect the outlines of type in this story. A fourth-generation cobbler so intimate with his craft that he carries a set of tools in his jacket, Charley Price (Joel Edgerton) – lacking self-knowledge – instead sets out for London with his social-climbing fiancé Nicola. This will be a mistake of rash youth. When Charley’s father dies, he’s soon back in Northampton. Price & Sons shoe factory is failing. One night, disheartened and drunk, he encounters punks harassing a towering Black drag queen. He’s knocked flat and Lola (the always-welcome Chiwetel Ejiofor) stashes him in her dressing room till he comes to. From backstage, he sees part of Lola’s show. It is quite good. Back home after this glimpse of the strange, he must start firing workers. With each he demurs, “What can I do?” Then one answers him, “Change the product.” This would be Lauren (Sarah-Jane Potts, familiar from TV work on NYPD Blue and Six Feet Under). Destined from that moment to replace the ill-suited fiancé, Lauren visits the drag club with Charley. Soon, tart-tongued Lola is designing stiletto boots “the color of sex” for Price & Sons’ new collection, which must make a splash at the annual international show in Milan. Ever since Mickey and Judy, saving the farm has involved performing to thunderous applause in the nick of time, so Milan means getting Lola and her back-up group onto the runway. En route, Charley discovers his own niche still lays in his own back yard. *** In Kinky Boots, the pot-holes in this road, not surprisingly, consist of getting Lola onto that factory floor with the blue-collar workers, where the drag queen tangles with the likes of shoemaker Don and his buddies. With foresight years ago, Lola’s father supplied boxing lessons. So Lola can take care of herself and has moved on to other tests of “real” manhood. As a kind of chorus, nearly every woman in Kinky Boots – even Lola’s elderly provincial landlady – seems unfazed by Lola’s presence, even affectionate. Don’s only comrade among them – ironic, since she fancies herself superior – is that rashly chosen fiancé. This doesn’t mean that women are broader-minded. Au contraire, here it signals that this is a restore-and-maintain story, not a tear-down-and-start-over story. Remember, only one gay person in Kinky Boots is around long enough to even have a name, much less a sex life or partner. *** Kinky Boots has four song and dance numbers. Naturally they star Lola. Among his increasingly apparent myriad talents, the actor Chiwetel Ejiofor sings and dances with great command. (Happily, he’s got five more films coming this year and next.) The opening number is a hummer days afterward: “I want to be eee-ville! I want to be bad!” Tap tap tap, synchronized dip, stride, twirl and grind, great eyebrow work and that deep melodic voice to which you pay sudden attention each time. *** The production and performance values for Ejiofor’s musical numbers are high. In this regard, a related film like The Full Monty seems sloppy, emphasizing raucous abandon over musical performance. Further, this film’s musical score evokes emotions any audience can connect with, as when Charley switches on the lights at Price & Sons after his father’s funeral – a moment flooded unexpectedly with Nina Simone’s voice, a dirge powerful as an undertow. Or, the torch-song instrumental that backs Lola as she impudently snakes across the factory floor to Don’s lap the first day there, setting off a firestorm of wordless, hilarious, epic struggles that cross his face. *** Director Julian Jarrold, whose first feature-length film this is after some Emmy-nominated TV work for the BBC, seems to use this story as a visual meditation upon the seductions and limits of assembly-line sameness. Some of DP Eigil Bryld’s most beautiful shots linger on machines turning leather into shoes. Charley’s dismissals of some workers are shot as a series of interchangeable conversations, suddenly derailed by Lauren’s out-of-place advice. The choreography of Lola’s production numbers is explicitly structured upon satiric repetition and mirroring of patterned movements. Lola has knowingly modeled her own persona on others (including movie incarnations, from the Lola poster on her wall). *** In contrast, Charley starts out lumpy-faced, with a hang-dog air and scruffy haircut. Many turning points depend on his clumsiness – actually his failure to live up to type. He discovers key financial papers by spilling coffee on his desk. His factory workers fill in crucial gaps after he’s fumbled with his office speaker and left it on. He stumbles on the runway in Milan. Little by little, Charley’s looks and finesse improve. When he tells that developer his factory’s not for sale, it’s like turning a lens just slightly to bring him into focus. And somehow, in the scene right after he and Lauren have kissed – did Charley duck into some Italian salon for a make-over? *** The New York Times’ Stephen Holden does not like this film but usefully commented that the movie drag queen, “flamboyantly confrontational but tenderhearted . . . arrives just in time to be the 21st-century replacement for that poignant outcast of an earlier era, the whore with a heart of gold.” He cites Gone With The Wind’s Belle Watling – a comparison Lola would like for its brush with grandeur. Just go in with your eyes open. *** This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com, where it appeared 5/26/06.

Film Review #43 – “On FRIENDS WITH MONEY” *** Writer/director Nicole Holofcener *** Cast: Jennifer Anniston, Joan Cusack, Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand *** B+ *** There is a scene midway through Nicole Holofcener’s FRIENDS WITH MONEY where the wildly affluent and moderately ditzy Franny (Joan Cusack) discusses her long-time younger friend Olivia (Jennifer Aniston) with her husband as they undress for bed after a dinner out with friends. Franny and her husband are planning a gift of $2 million to their toddler’s daycare center, while Olivia, having quit her job as a high school teacher, has started cleaning houses. Franny’s helped Olivia out financially before – she’ll resist lending her money again, but she will fix her up romantically with a personal trainer who turns out to be a jerk. Olivia does just fine in both the money and man departments by closing fade-out, and turns out to be a fine friend in some old-fashioned ways that matter. But first, Franny’s husband wonders aloud if the two women would be friends at all if they met now. Thinking a moment, Franny decides, “Probably not.” *** Ostensibly FRIENDS WITH MONEY is about the anxieties that money can produce among intimate friends in a highly mobile society. Holofcener recently told the Washington Post that creeping income disparities in her own circle of friends and family had eventually caused such mischief that she found herself “ashamed when I cared, ashamed when I was materialistic, jealous when I didn’t have it, guilty when I did.” *** Her film presents a quartet of West Coast women played by Anniston and Cusack, along with Catherine Keener (a screenwriter whose marriage to her work partner falls apart) and Frances McDormand (a fashion designer with an enormously gentle, appealing husband whom nearly every other character insists must be gay – adding an astute, efficient subtext to the film about the maddening, contradictory burdens even progressive women put on men). *** Each of Holofcener’s feature films has used some issue of current, representative social mores as a frame on which to hang a story about relationships among women. In 2002 her LOVELY AND AMAZING focused on the toll of women’s pervasive discomfort with their bodies (or some might say, on contemporary narcissism). Her first film, WALKING AND TALKING(1996), tackled the strain that occurs for life-long best friends when one gets happily engaged and the other’s problems with men persist. Between films, she’s worked as a television writer and director on what could be called similar fictional commentaries on contemporary life: HBO’s SEX AND THE CITY and SIX FEET UNDER, and WB’s GILMORE GIRLS. *** But Holofcener’s films really wear their social issues like a loose garment. For good or ill, she is primarily a story-teller of personal lives. *** The strength of Holofcener’s story-telling resides in choreographing the critical junctures in her often quirky characters’ relationships. FRIENDS WITH MONEY manages to juggle four women’s relationship issues with their partners and each other through a series of vignettes about their non-earth-shattering but personally significant crises. *** Olivia’s apparent crisis is just the dramatic device to get things rolling. Like the sleep-walking woman on the edge of the cliff in an old melodrama, somehow she fails to grasp the danger of her stint as a maid that her friends – and even Franny’s Mexican maid – see it for. Not that Olivia’s a fool. Her reassuring answer to the client who’s embarrassed his house is so messy – “That’s what I’m here for” – suggests that she probably was patient with those high school students. Olivia often takes the time to think before she answers, a sign of more self-possession than her friends give her credit for. And in a film whose aesthetic depends so heavily on the human face, you know something is really wrong when she comments about the jerky boyfriend that the “sex is fun but he doesn’t look at me.” Holofcener’s filmmaking proceeds by small, carefully crafted and very often rich, purely visual moments. This signifies both her considerable craft and her major challenge. *** Catherine Keener’s been in all three Holofcener features and it’s a pleasure to re-watch the films just to see her decade’s growth as an actor. Holofcener’s casts indicate that from the start, actors who have turned out to be very good have loved working with her. Why would this be so? FRIENDS WITH MONEY offers us spectacularly good acting among all its principals that is quintessentially screen acting. In that way it reminds me a bit of Rodrigo Garcia’s work. His NINE LIVES (2005), along with his previous two films (TEN TINY LOVE STORIES in 2001 and THINGS YOU CAN TELL JUST BY LOOKING AT HER in 2000) and his directing work – actually much like Holofcener’s – on several HBO series, work more radically by stringing together anthologies of discrete, short episodes. Like him, Holofcener has a dazzling ability to create finely wrought, up-close scenes – sometimes scenes that go a great distance forward on physical acting, though she’s no slouch with dialogue. Screen actors love this chance to do close work with director and camera; when it clicks it can sometimes approach the rare cinematic equivalent of what stage actors describe as that electric exchange with a live audience. *** Such close work can be risky. Viewers and critics alike often prefer it in small doses. For example, director Amos Gitae did work like this in his new FREE ZONE's opening scene, with that ten minute close-up of Natalie Portman weeping silently against the soundtrack’s Israeli song. But whole films built on such close work require an unaccustomed attention that can be exhausting and translate to complaints of boredom, demands for editing and wishes for “larger” aims – that is, more action, more dialogue, greater consequences, and different cinematography. Indeed, if critics have complained about Holofcener’s work – even while appreciating her extraordinary skill with actors – it’s been to wish she were more “adventurous,” less “modest.” *** Here in upstate New York, FRIENDS WITH MONEY straddles a line, screening simultaneously at both the mall multiplex and at a locally-owned small art cinema just off-campus. I’m reminded of a birthday card I saw recently: on the cover there’s a girl with candles on her cake, inside the message, “Dream bigger.” Tighter, deeper, both more focused and generous than her first two films, FRIENDS WITH MONEY is the film I think we’ll look back on as that moment when Holofcener did just that. *** This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com, where it appeared 5/11/06.

Film Review #42: On SISTERS IN LAW *** Producer/writer/director/cinematographer: Kim Longinotto *** Co-director: Florence Ayisi *** Documentary, 2005 (104 minutes) *** Cast: Vera Ngassa, Beatrice Ntuba, Amina Abubakari *** Kim Longinotto’s SISTERS IN LAW had its US theatrical opening on April 12 at Film Forum in New York City’s South Village. Opening night featured a Q & A with Longinotto after the 8 p.m. screening, which played to an overflow audience, with some standing in the aisle. *** SISTERS IN LAW was my fourth movie that day and – therefore counter-intuitively – by far the best. Shot in mostly poor, mostly Muslim Kumba Township in the southwest corner of Cameroon over three and a half months in 2004, SISTERS IN LAW follows several cases involving women and children plaintiffs through the local justice court. Young Sonita was raped by a neighbor. Amina seeks divorce, fearing her husband will kill her if she’s sent home. Six-year-old Manka bears torso scars from coat-hanger beatings by her custodial aunt. Longinotto profiles prosecutor Vera Ngassa (also a judge and university law professor) and district court judge Beatrice Ntuba as they investigate and resolve these cases. Both women are entirely clear about the stakes for community and petitioners alike. *** At several points the camera rests on that universally-recognized scowl of bafflement some men wear when they are thwarted by women for the first time. The opening night audience laughed aloud at those moments, though Longinotto says for her that laughter is more “dark and bleak” than comedic. Speaking by phone last week from Colorado, the filmmaker said those men “didn’t mind being filmed – they didn’t see their behavior as wrong.” She recalled how one seemingly “urbane and educated” fellow acknowledged he beat his wife and added, “But I gave her medicines.” *** A handful of positive media reviews in early April paved SISTERS IN LAW's way to Film Forum. This theatrical release follows 120 festival appearances world-wide, with lots of prizes and accolades. Stella Pence, who runs Telluride’s Film Festival, calls it “one of the best documentaries of all times.” But SISTERS IN LAW is destined for classic status more for its women and their solutions than for exposing comfortable and clueless men as cads. *** The specific quality of justice portrayed here makes SISTERS IN LAW uncommon and instructive. Once, Vera leans over to softly ask a beaten down wife, whose purchase price was a pig – who was not, according to Longinotto, “even at her own wedding” – “Oh, Madame, what shall we do with these two men?” In another scene, a policewoman attached to the court investigates the child Manka’s family situation. Manka’s aunt claims the girl’s parents live in a countryside village, but then the officer also asks Manka, she reveals her parents are dead – so she is quite at her aunt’s mercy. While Longinotto calls this type of exchange “Vera’s democratic instinct,” any acquaintance with treating abuse would tell you that such direct questions – and believing the answers – also constitute the first intervention on the road to healing trauma. *** Longinotto takes the time as well to intersperse several short interludes in which Vera plays with her own son in her office. She attentively talks with him, touches him, teaches him colors and gently corrects his wrong answers, tickles him. Rather than have a narrator intone a list of policy solutions, Longinotto shows us specifically how the new men of Kumba are raised. From Colorado, she said the boy’s name is Moses, and that Vera adopted him when his young mother came to court’s attention because she tried to kill her baby. *** Lack of back-story and context crop up as the most common complaint about SISTERS IN LAW. Longinotto and her co-director for this film, International Film School Wales lecturer and native Cameroonian Florence Ayisi, shot in strict cinema verite style. A big fan of narration and context myself, I was surprised to notice that, this time, that complaint simply dropped away for me. Indeed, imposing such conventions would interfere with SISTERS IN LAW's capacity to connect as film. *** Having watched “practically all” of THE SOPRANOS, Longinotto notes that the HBO series’ viewers don’t expect history or statistics on the Mafia. She herself was aiming for “the power of fiction – the sense of danger and of immediacy and of freshness” that generate identification and emotional connection. The riveting experience of watching SISTERS IN LAW is one of the more striking arguments for this style of documentary that I have encountered. *** SISTERS IN LAW is also her third courtroom film and as such makes use of a genre that connects well with film audiences in the West if one’s aim is universality. She made DIVORCE IRANIAN-STYLE (1998) with co-director Ziba Mir-Hosseini, author of a book on Iranian divorce courts, to fill the gap between a surge of European films about Middle Eastern “fanatics” and “graceful, poetic” Iranian films such as those of Abbas Kiarostami. THE DAY I WILL NEVER FORGET (2002) follows a group of Kenyan schoolgirls who seek human rights workers’ help to escape genital mutilation. Trained in England’s National Film School, Longinotto has been making verite docs for a couple decades, often traveling outside the U.K. and Europe to do so when not writing for TV. *** Probable next trip is Pakistan, with a friend born there who’s writing a novel and wanted company, but also in response to what she sees as an “anti-Muslim crusade” in the West. As always, she’ll seek stories about women that might make a film. *** SISTERS IN LAW's limited theatrical release in the US through the end of May includes San Francisco, Boston, Seattle & Chicago. Check screenings at Women Make Movies’ website, http://www.wmm.com/. Hear Nancy’s interview with Kim Longinotto on Women’s Voices Radio, WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM on June 1st at 8 p.m. EST via web-streaming at http://www.waer.org/. This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com & published there on 5/3/2006. [Text = 938 words]

Film Review #41 - On ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN * 1968 – 69 min., Director - Peter Lennon * 2005 U.K. DVD Release from Soda Pictures includes THE MAKING OF ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN (2004 – 27 min., Director – Paul Duane) * * * As Ireland celebrates the 90th anniversary of its historic 1916 Easter Rising on Monday, April 17th (the actual anniversary date is a week later on April 24th), one of cinema’s foremost responses to that short-lived but far-reaching rebellion is now widely available on DVD. I picked up Peter Lennon’s 1968 documentary, ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN, during a recent trip to Dublin at the Irish Film Institute’s bookshop, where it was centrally advertised with a huge hand-lettered sign – a far cry from nearly four decades of effective banning. The DVD includes the 1968 film, restored in 2003 by the Irish Film Board, and an excellent MAKING OF… companion documentary from 2004 directed by Paul Duane. Sometimes compared now with filmmaker Michael Moore, Lennon narrated ROCKY ROAD himself. In the midst of 1960’s cultural and political ferment, he argued that the “weight of heroes and clergy” had nearly sunk Ireland and long since hi-jacked the aims of 1916’s “poets and socialists.” He was explicit that a “republic” required a society to match its politics. ROCKY ROAD’s central question – “What do you do with your revolution once you’ve got it?” – becomes the film’s refrain, paralleling the popular pub song by The Dubliners that gives the film both its title and its musical backbone. Lennon has not mellowed; in a GUARDIAN article from last year, reprinted as the liner note, he called the Catholic Church “Ireland’s KGB.” Although I would prefer brisker editing in some spots, ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN has a sure and graceful look that it comes by rightfully. Lennon wanted a “personal” look with hand-held camera and minimal lighting. French New Wave cinematographer Raoul Coutard shot ROCKY ROAD in 1967 during his spare time, between work on Truffaut’s THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and Godard’s WEEKEND. Such openness to participating with new filmmakers on edgy projects was characteristic of the vibrant French film culture that exhilarated Peter Lennon, an Irish journalist working as a junior correspondent in 1960’s Paris. Lennon had never made a film before, but he grasped that the French used film as English-speaking writers used the pen – "cinema-stylo," they called it. Already Lennon’s visits home had produced a controversial series of 1964 articles in THE GUARDIAN examining Irish censorship, cultural isolationism and the clergy’s grip on education and family life, which he developed in the film. ROCKY ROAD establishes its satiric bent at once, opening with footage of Christian Brothers students reciting rote Catechism answers about the human condition with dour certainty: “Because of Adam’s sin we are born without sanctifying grace, our intellect is darkened, our will is weakened and our passions incline us to evil and we are subject to suffering and death.” One feels a peculiar vertigo; it is so easy to imagine these twelve-year-old boys morphing into pinched-faced old men with a whiff of Taliban about them – and just then the film cuts to The Dubliners’ rollicking title song. Later a list of writers, poets and playwrights banned in Ireland scrolls down a black screen, accompanied by tolling church bells. My Irish grandmother would call such juxtapositions “instigating,” and you can see right away that Lennon had insider knowledge about how to infuriate the earnest. ROCKY ROAD combines commentary, stills and archival footage, juxtapositions of music and segments, cinema verite slices of Irish life – class-based sports competitions (hurling and horse shows), life in pubs, street scenes and landscape, grim-faced couples at courtship dances and wedding receptions, a college discussion of censorship – with a series of telling interviews. These include writer Sean O’Faolain on Ireland’s “society of peasants,” a Gaelic Athletic Association spokesman explaining why it banned even watching “English games,” an elderly member of the censorship board, film director John Huston, and an extended visit with the “progressive, modern” priest the Church – incredibly – offered to Lennon for the film (“What was in their mind?” I can hear my grandmother asking). We first meet Father Michael Cleary performing his own syncopated version of “Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy” for a small hostage audience of patients and nurses in a women’s hospital ward, whose faces register either a creepy transport close to swooning or that singular stiff resignation present when endurance is the only option. The camera lingers drolly on the priest’s thigh jouncing as he keeps time. Father Cleary also orchestrates a wedding reception’s every turn, chats with grave-diggers, and acknowledges to Lennon with apparent energetic candor that, “Sure,” celibacy is hard, “but I had seven years to think about it.” As revealed in the DVD’s companion MAKING OF… special feature, Cleary was already sleeping with his teenage house-keeper during that interview. University College Dublin film lecturer Harvey O’Brien also writes in his 2004 history of the Irish documentary, THE REAL IRELAND, that she later published a sensational memoir about their affair and child "which turned out to be true." But the really arresting Father Cleary scene is that insinuating, self-infatuated hospital performance. I knew I’d seen it somewhere before. There’s a priest singing at a party in the opening scene of Peter Mullan’s film about 1960’s Ireland, THE MAGDALENA SISTERS (2002). His seductiveness, the damp-cheeked response of the women, and the arousal of the men watching – all cross the room visually in waves, leading to the back-room rape of a cousin that begins Mullan’s fictionalized account of the Irish Church’s wide-spread practice of simply locking up potentially wayward women for life in their chain of commercial laundries. It’s tantalizing to wonder if Mullan had seen ROCKY ROAD and made use of this emblematic scene. Entered independently at Cannes in 1968, ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN was the last film to screen before Truffaut, Claude Lelouche and others closed down the festival in solidarity with the student strikes in Paris. Those same students then screened ROCKY ROAD at the Sorbonne during the riots, launching the film’s outlaw popularity on the continent and in a few North American university film programs. Much of Ireland was furious. Although the film was never officially banned, theater managers simply refused to book it; most Irish critics attacked it. Following an initial Dublin screening, a tumultuous incident at Ireland’s Cork Film Festival and one packed, seven-week run, ROCKY ROAD sank from sight on home ground, stored in the Irish Film Archive until the Irish Film Board and Loopline Productions agreed to restoration in 2003. Paul Duane’s 27-minute MAKING OF…provides much of this invaluable context and more. I might be tempted to call his the better documentary, if only because it avoids ROCKY ROAD's several claustrophobia-inducing lengthy sequences. But perhaps Lennon and Coutard knew what they were doing after all, since those segments manage to convey the lock-down of their subjects’ existence. In the intervening years that ROCKY ROAD slept - at least on Irish soil - Ireland’s own film culture has blossomed. It boasts the second highest film attendance per capita in Europe and an international cinematic literacy and perspective the US should envy. A good scene for a home-coming. * * * If you’re not in Dublin yourself, you can get the U.K. DVD of ROCKY ROAD... (including the 27-minute companion doc) on-line at the Irish Film Institute’s bookshop (www.irishfilm.ie). The US distributor, First Run/Icarus Films (www.frif.com), sells the two docs separately or together. * * * This review is also published at www.Stylusmagazine.com (4/21/06).

Recovered Film Review #29-A: “Poof! You’re a Movie! On the Screen Adaptation of David Auburn’s Play, PROOF” * Nancy Keefe Rhodes * Broadcast on Women’s Voices Radio, WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM on 10/20/2005 And now “Poof! You’re a Movie!” – a look at what happened to David Auburn’s award-winning play, PROOF, on its way to the screen. You might be among the fortunate here in Central New York who saw The Redhouse’s wonderfully well-directed & acted stage production of this play about a year ago. It isn’t that you won’t recognize what’s on-screen out at Manlius Cinema, but there is good news & bad news about that transformation. I’m going to start with the bad news so you will fully appreciate the good. PROOF is the story of a young Chicago woman, Catherine, who must bury her brilliant but quite crazy father Robert on her birthday. Catherine has been rattling around in the house caring for Robert & neglecting her own life & talent. She & those around her fear she may have inherited his instability. Her claim that she has authored an astounding new a mathematical proof is disbelieved by both Robert’s graduate student, Hal, and Catherine’s sister Clair, who has flown in from New York for the funeral to get everybody in ship shape. That PROOF began life as a play means that putting it on-screen to begin with presents a problem. As you can see in this case, it isn’t just the basic problem that plays showing up on-screen suddenly seem way more talky than they ever did on-stage, but let’s start with that. The first rule of screen-writing is that showing trumps telling, because the ways movies & theater approach telling stories are just fundamentally different. Stage abstracts & enacts. It treats background differently than film does, so that the characters stand out & are enhanced. I had misgivings when I noticed that David Auburn’s co-author on this screen adaptation was Rebecca Miller. Two months ago I reviewed her film, THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE, here, a film with memorable & tremendously moving moments – also about the heart-wrenching, costly & misplaced love between a father & daughter, & a film with many of the same flaws that PROOF has. Yes, I blame Rebecca Miller for those flaws, though I can’t for the life of me figure out what turned David Auburn’s head so that he abandoned several of the finest parts of his meticulously constructed play. After a while it dawned on me that PROOF the movie is fiercely anti-stage. First, it abandons the porch upon which the play’s entire action occurs – that domestic outpost, that architectural metaphor for the border between our public & private lives. Then there are the times the film literally loses its characters in the camera’s frenzy at being free to wander about Chicago. It took me a moment to find Catherine & Clair in one crowded street scene – very distracting – & Catherine’s ride home from the airport near the end – she’s not in it. These are major mistakes & you’ll have to spend a lot of energy staying focused on what really are fairly nuanced actions. The other major metaphorical abandonment is that here in the film, Hal who seduces Catherine rather than the right way round. Theater not the only thing that travels poorly to the screen. Think about how genius travels, especially the sort that most of us can’t understand. Numbers make my eyes glaze over. When Hal & Catherine make cocktail chat out of prime numbers theory, that mostly leaves me in the dust. In Catherine’s surprising but plausible seduction of her father’s student, David Auburn provides a glimpse of how her mind might also be capable of moving – decisively, brilliantly, hiply – well, with genius. The film version takes the wind out of her sails as both a woman & as a prodigy. Now she is merely angry at times, although her anger is part of the good stuff. As in the scenes with her sister. Rarely has sisterly bickering had more bite & huff than Gwyneth Paltrow & Hope Davis bring it here. What the camera can do, when it settles down, is pay attention to some extraordinary acting at close quarters, especially from Paltrow, who also starred in the London stage production. So, is Catherine’s genius really any less exotic to us than such current movie characters as Domino the bounty hunter-model, MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, or Pocahontas in the forthcoming NEW WORLD? I wonder. But most of us do understand losing our grip. I’m grateful beyond measure that somehow Robert’s own final proof survived to the screen – though now it has a reading in a cozy study instead of the frigid winter-night lawn where it belongs. Here is what he’s been scribbling: “Let X equal the quantity of all quantities of X. Let X equal the cold. It is cold in December. The months of cold equal November through February. There are four months of cold & four months of heat, leaving four months of indeterminate temperature. In February it snows. In March the lake is a lake of ice. In September the students come back & the bookstores are full. Let X equal the months of full bookstores. The number of books approaches infinity as the number of months of cold approaches four. I will never be as cold now as I will in the future. The future of cold is infinite. The future of heat is the future of cold. The bookstores are infinite & so are never full except in September.” I felt sorrow & pity, which I guess is proof they still managed to pull it off. * [914]

#40: On Sally Potter’s YES * Written & directed by Sally Potter * United Kingdom 2004; US DVD release November 2005 * With Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian, Sam Neill * 110 minutes * This review also appears in the March 20, 2006 issue of stylusmagazine.com * Midway through Sally Potter’s latest film, YES, the lovers named only She (Joan Allen) and He (Simon Abkarian) engage in a wrenching argument in a deserted dark cavern of a parking garage. This was the scene Potter wrote first for her script, just after the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, and it serves as the film’s – and the larger parable’s – turning point. Until now, their’s has been a secret affair, undisturbing to the surface of their lives, ignorant and oblivious of each other’s origins. In picking this fight, He makes clear that the luxury of such denial has become impossible. Further, this is the only time that any character in YES mentions that they’re all speaking in rhyming iambic pentameter. Complaining that he has had to make all the cultural adjustments in their relationship, the man says, “I even rhyme in your tongue.” At first only panicky, she is suddenly curious, asking, ‘’Tell me more.’’ * Their background: She is a Belfast-born, U.S.-raised research biochemist, living in London and married to a British politician (Sam Neill) who cheats on her. He is a Lebanese surgeon who left Beirut to escape the war there. In London, He works as a chef, until an incident with a bigoted kitchen worker forces him to quit. They meet at a dinner party where he notices her distress – she is pacing, later weeps at the table over her husband’s unfaithfulness – and speaks gently to her. Their affair is rapid, lyrical, heated – but cannot escape the steaming, clanging bickering of the kitchen workers. * In the parking garage, He breaks it off following the kitchen incident. They each return ‘’home’’ – she to her aunt’s Belfast deathbed, he to his friend’s clinic and wedding celebration. Speaking by cell from the Belfast hospital corridor to a bombed-out street in Beirut, She asks him to meet her – of all places – in Havana. Arriving alone, hoping he’ll join her, She goes sight-seeing and night-club dancing in scenes intercut with his Beirut activities. A single musical sequence overlays and unites these alternating scenes, suggesting that his return to Beirut is somehow equivalent to her tourism. Early in their affair, He had called her his “true home.” Certainly their reunion suggests they complete each other, both literally and as parable. * Potter has referenced her film’s title in James Joyce’s Irish novel ULYSSES, the word falling at the beginning and end of Molly Bloom’s monologue about the transcendent joys of physical union, a monologue that pushed the limits of language in the early 20th century. That most of the film’s dialogue is written in verse steals across our awareness slowly – or possibly not at all. The dialogue has a measured cadence and sometimes obvious rhymes, but some viewers might recall the dialogue as merely “lyrical” or “poetic.” Potter says that she directed her cast to concentrate on their lines’ emotional content rather than count its formal beats. That is, except for the single reference, she preferred to leave the language’s structure submerged. And since the parking garage argument is about uncovering the social structures that make their relationship problematic – especially for him – putting this reference to the dialogue’s rhyme in the same spot is simple consistency. * The rhyming dialogue that Potter says is what made investors most reluctant – YES was made in the end for about half its original budget – should not scare audiences off. Sally Potter is an English musician, performance artist, singer, dancer, and stage actress who also makes movies – writing, directing, and sometimes scoring her own films. Her earlier films, the first in 1979, some shorts, a feature shot in Iceland with Julie Christie and an all-female crew (THE GOLD DIGGERS), and some documentaries, are mostly unavailable in the U.S. She is at home across art forms – her early short film THRILLER adapted Puccini’s LA BOEHME and her 1997 film THE TANGO LESSON (sadly a hard film to locate), stars herself as a screenwriter named Sally Potter who escapes writer’s block in dance lessons. She has worked with elaborate period pieces – notably ORLANDO, her 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel that recapitulates four centuries of British history, with actor Tilda Swinton in the title role, and 2000’s THE MAN WHO CRIED, a saga of European anti-Semitism. * At first glance her work might seem akin to the experimental cinema of British avante garde contemporaries like Peter Greenaway in its “high cultural” literacy and tone. But Potter has increasingly been part of the wider cinematic landscape since ORLANDO, and she developed her work over the same last quarter century as many internationally inspired indie filmmakers. Not for Potter the self-referential hand-held “home video” look, but there’s a similar concern with violence, enormous attention on re-working narrative, inventive camera angles and focus and speed, sound design that conveys aspects of narrative beyond straightforward plotting, and comedy alongside the serious (often some character turns to the camera mid-action for an ironic quip). Potter has increasingly used international crews and American actors interested in international projects; her current cinematographer worked with French director Alain Resnais on films such as LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD and NIGHT AND FOG. * YES is hardly a stiff, “arty,” esoteric film, either in itself or its pedigree. This begins immediately with its performances. With the possible exception of her “earth mother” role in 2003’s OFF THE MAP – I’m going to pass over THE UPSIDE OF ANGER here – YES’ She is a sensual and openly emotional Joan Allen as American audiences have rarely seen her, emerging from pinched, stodgier roles such as First Lady Pat Nixon, THE CONTENDER’s tight-lipped Senator, and THE CRUCIBLE’s silently suffering Elizabeth Proctor. Armenian-Lebanese actor Simon Abkarian is a graceful, loose-limbed man; He performs a Lebanese wedding dance for She after one of their trysts (a dance he’ll perform again later at a friend’s wedding in Beirut with obvious hesitation, perhaps conveying his recollection of dancing earlier for his lover). * But the paramount scene in YES for manifesting the tension that contains passion within structure occurs in a restaurant, where He’s hand beneath the table touching her causes She to climax. The polar opposite of that famous WHEN HARRY MET SALLY restaurant scene, in which Meg Ryan’s character loudly calls attention to herself by demonstrating how to fake an orgasm, here is a delicious demonstration of conveying more with less – just She’s hand tightening on his arm, her breath catching. “Delicious” must be the effect that Potter sought too; He licks his fingers playfully afterward, causing She to laugh. * Even intelligent U.S reviewers have not always praised YES. THE NEW YORK TIMES’ A.O. Scott accused Potter’s characters of “overblown tristesse” and her dialogue of “staggering banality” in his 6/24/05 review, just after YES had screened at the New York Film Festival. After a brief September theatrical release in the U.S., the DVD followed in November. But Scott also found the plot in Oscar-winning CRASH “implausible” in its neatly interlocking pieces – that CRASH is about the redemptive power and magic of love, not logistics, sailed over his head. And the heart of YES is not about metrics either. * [1,177]

#39: Greenhouse Effects: RORY O’SHEA WAS HERE & Brian Friel’s MOLLY SWEENEY * 3/3/06 Only this morning I’ve read two reviews in the local paper complaining that films opening here this weekend are formulaic rehashes. I think this quest for surprise is a tad pinched & short-sighted. After all, Fellini’s inventiveness built a whole cinematic career on the stock characters & plots of Italy’s commedia del arte. And the American Western movie largely depends on how a director interacts with its established conventions. Director Damien O’Donnell’s RORY O’SHEA WAS HERE is a 2004 Irish film that’s now available state-side on DVD. It opens Sunday afternoon at the Redhouse in Armory Square for a three week run there, ending right after St. Patrick’s Day. As often happens at the Redhouse, programming in one realm reflects another. J.T. Lee, who runs the film program there, intentionally paired RORY O’SHEA with the current stage production of Brian Friel’s 1994 play, MOLLY SWEENEY, which opened last week. The movie addresses one sort of physical disability (muscular dystrophy & cerebral palsy) & the play another (blindness), both of which occur for people who are ordinary rather than heroic. We meet RORY O’SHEA’s title character (played by James McAvoy) when he enters yet another nursing home at the age of 21. Quickly settled in, his Che posters & photos of himself with luscious babes proclaim a vanished lifestyle. He’s the one with muscular dystrophy. He makes friends with Michael (Steven Robertson) for initially instrumental reasons. Despite his severely spastic body, Michael is willing to spike Rory’s hair with gel when the nurses wear out on that chore, & Rory understands Michael’s garbled speech, thus providing him with a translator to navigate more widely in the world. There’s a girl who’s beyond reach, obstacles to be gotten around, & an authoritarian administrator (Brenda Fricker, ironically evoking this movie’s 1989 predecessor, MY LEFT FOOT, in which she had a very different role). Rory & Michael finagle a way to leave the home for their own apartment & Rory, having served his purpose by streaking across Michael’s dark horizon like a meteor, meets what his father says is his “expected” end. As the title pounds home, Rory’s purpose is to be remembered in another’s redeemed life, not to live his own. Yes, we’ve seen this plot before. For example, there’s Peter Chelsom’s small but admirable 1998 movie, THE MIGHTY, & another variation in the classic ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST. And so on. Decried by some reviewers as emotionally excessive & manipulative, Rory’s “expected” death explains his impatience, his short temper & what his minders consider his bad adjustment. Since we expect the disabled – the stigmatized of all kinds – to do the work of making the rest of us comfortable, such stories really demand some device to rescue characters like Rory from simply being labeled poor sports. O’Donnell takes a deeper look at these boys as social outsiders, something he’s done before. His 1999 film, EAST IS EAST (1999), makes use of the stock plot of East Indian immigrants both adjusting to & clashing with London culture that has generated a lively sub-genre of similar films, such as the 1997 MY SON THE FANATIC & the better-known BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM (2002). In attempting to live on their own, Michael & Rory are certainly much like foreigners who resist ghetto confinement. Also edgier than we might think is director O’Donnell’s willingness to make us uncomfortable with Michael. Rory is an attractive young man – the phrase “happens to be sitting in a wheelchair” could actually apply to him in the bar scene. Michael’s another matter. Many viewers will have to admit they share the bar girls’ queasiness with him as a potential date. This deepens the abjectness of Michael’s heartbreak when one of those bar girls, Siobhan, who briefly winds up as the boys’ personal assistant, feels she must leave when his emotions become too hot for her. I suspect this was harder for a director to pull off. In a lazier movie, Michael would be the side-kick watching Siobhan & Rory, leaving us all less ruffled. Because of this discomfort, RORY O’SHEA WAS HERE is an apt companion to Friel’s MOLLY SWEENEY, even though we know this decent little film is not going to survive anywhere near as long as Friel’s great play. Especially as mounted at the Redhouse, MOLLY SWEENEY will engage you & make you more uncomfortable in its last moments than you imagined. Director Gerard Moses told me on opening night that the play “really is an Irish RASHOMON,” presenting three radically different versions of blind & large-hearted but rather ordinary title character Molly’s return to sight. Blindness as a rich, multi-hued metaphor goes back to the Greeks & beyond, of course, & it’s appeared before on the Irish stage, in Synge’s work, for one. MOLLY SWEENEY relies heavily on the work of Oliver Sacks with the blind, in particular with the adjustments they encounter when “sight” turns out to be different & harder than they expected, & not all that congenial. There are many things to admire about this production. We are used to Gerard Moses’ nuanced direction & physical characterizations, which often go well beyond what a script offers. But when you know how little guidance Friel’s text provides in this regard, & how quiet & devoid of sets & lighting other productions have been, you will appreciate more what’s been created here. In a deeply moving & arresting performance by Nicole Halmos, Molly doesn’t do well with her new sight. Friel’s language in her mouth is a joy. But look further: in the blocking of her movements, Halmos several times makes a simple, clean change in direction that serves to almost paragraph what’s happening on-stage, a repeated half-turn that could be described as “dancerly” (much the same as in film we see some cinematography as “painterly”). Molly is at home in her blindness & we spend a long, leisurely time with this woman, free to look her over. Then, in her brilliantly performed last scene, Halmos’ Molly turns once more, & we get a taste of how unexpectedly overwhelming acquiring vision might be. For once, I’m not going to tell you any more, but a tiny choice about how to play this provides the kind of shock that makes the best theater. You must see this. Both the movie & the play rely on formulas. Both are parables, & their stock elements relieve an audience of engaging with ambivalence & discomfort at a merely intellectual level – where opinions about political & social “issues” tend to harden – & instead fly under the radar of the audience’s own shame. I think this is a gift. (1,107)